Is it time to get rid of SBS?

Talk of a merger between the ABC and SBS has intensified following Mark Scott's appearance at Senate estimates yesterday. But those who love SBS fear the two would "merge" the way a shark merges with a mackerel.

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Has SBS’ time come? ABC boss Mark Scott appears to think so, describing the multicultural broadcaster as an “analogue solution in a digital world” at Senate estimates yesterday. In a world of multichannels, he said, there was no reason to produce multicultural content with an entirely separate network.

A solution to this redundancy could be to merge our public broadcasters, and in fact suggestions SBS be made part of the ABC go a long way back — well before the rise of digital television. SBS was originally intended to operate as part of the ABC, until then-prime minister Malcolm Fraser grew convinced then-ABC management’s heart wasn’t in it. But ABC executives and board members in particular have floated the suggestion of a merger from time to time. Those within SBS firmly reject it, as former chairman Joe Skrzynski did at the National Press Club in 2014.

A merger, Skrzynski said, was “wrong in principle, bad economics and even worse politics”. The ABC was already too complex for its board to handle, and if multicultural broadcasting were added to the mix, there was no doubt it would be squeezed out and forgotten, Skrzynski argued. He told Crikey this morning that his views hadn’t changed.

In 2014, Skrzynski referenced the comments of former ABC chairman Maurice Newman three years earlier. On his way out of the role, Newman described not having achieved a merger between the two broadcasters as one of his regrets. “I think the case for funding two public broadcasters is increasingly hard to sustain,” he told The Australian in 2011. The ABC under Newman went so far as to commission a Boston Consulting Group report into the prospect, which estimated recurring annual savings of $41 million, no doubt partly through the redundancies of 125 staff. Newman told the Oz he’d been pushing for a merger during his chairmanship, to no avail.

Melbourne University journalism academic Margaret Simons, who has been covering the possibility of a merger between the two bodies for years, told Crikey that in her many interviews with Scott, she didn’t get the vibe he saw a merger as a key focus. “My reading of Scott is he’s not necessarily pushing for it,” she said. “I think he does believe it’s a logical solution.”

“It’s common sense in a way: you can do so much more with multichannels, and spectrum is no longer scarce.”

Part of Scott’s argument, raised in response to SBS’ concerns the ABC was moving in on its turf by scheduling Foreign Correspondent at the same time as Dateline, rested on the fact that much SBS programming on television now no longer appears primarily targeted at multicultural communities. “I think it’s true to say on any reckoning that there is far less subtitled content on its main channel than 20 or 30 years ago on their main channel,” he said. And SBS2 competed with ABC2 in airing younger-skewing programs in English.

SBS’ early approaches with multichannels was to focus on particular ethnic groupings. SBS2, for example, was conceived to focus on Asia-Pacific speciality shows, but was relaunched in 2013 to appeal to a youth audience (16-39). Critics note a young-skewing, English-speaking demographic is more useful to advertisers. “To get mass audiences you have to move to the middle,” said media analyst Peter Cox. “It’s a little bit like politics.”

But others point out SBS television hasn’t attempted to focus on foreign-language broadcasting for decades. The University of Western Sydney’s Professor Ien Ang, who wrote a book on SBS’ history, says if you want to see SBS’ commitment to multiculturalism, look to SBS Radio.

SBS broadcasts in 74 languages, which is twice as many languages as the Vatican Radio (some senators describe SBS radio as “twice the voice of God”). Even the BBC only serves 37 languages. SBS Radio broadcasts Australian news and current affairs, including daily news bulletins, in dozens of languages. While Australians who don’t speak fluent English can, these days, access news online from their place of birth, SBS Radio alone gives them Australia news in their native tongues.

“Radio is much more flexible than television,” Ang says. “It’s much more able to cater to smaller and more highly targeted audiences. SBS TV has always been hard, because of the enormous emphasis on ratings within broadcast television.”

Beginning in the 1990s, SBS television began to operate very differently from SBS radio. While radio continued to expand into new languages, television catered to what Ang calls “more cosmopolitan tastes” with the airing of many foreign-language films. In the early 2000s, the focus skewed younger, with edgier content like South Park, which was a massive hit for SBS.

Many of SBS’ biggest supporters don’t like the change of focus. Steve Aujard, head of viewer lobby group Save our SBS, tells Crikey the ABC wouldn’t be able to run the arguments it ran yesterday if SBS hadn’t moved away from its charter in the first place.

“We think there’s a need for SBS, but SBS needs to lift its game,” Aujard said. “If it doesn’t, of course there’ll be more and more discussions about some sort of merger. I’m prepared to listen to what everyone’s saying about it. And my comment would be, if SBS had been doing what they’re supposed to do on SBS television … we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”

Aujard is a fierce critic of the commercialisation of SBS, and was strongly opposed to the ad averaging bill proposed (and defeated in the Senate) last year. But he says that despite the frustrations community groups and some stakeholders have had with SBS of late, he can’t see a proposal to merge it with the ABC being accepted by the multicultural lobby.

“I don’t think Mark Scott’s proposal would ever get community support within ethnic communities … Although their input into the running of SBS isn’t as strong as it was 20 years ago, they retain a lot of affection for it. I don’t think the community support would be there.” Another SBS insider put it thus: “the multicultural community would be aghast”. Perhaps because of this, politically there hasn’t been, in recent years, much interest in a merger. But that could change if politicians are convinced the savings are there to be had.

But supporters of SBS fear the culture clash. Ang says that while the ABC is keen to grow its audiences, it doesn’t have the commitment to diversity that SBS does. “It’s really an afterthought. Within the mainstream ABC culture, diversity is not embedded as a value. And that’s absolutely crucial.

“You can say SBS struggles as well, but it does have a history of commitment to these issues. And I doubt whether something like that can survive with an ABC-dominated merger.”

Aujard says any “merger” between the two organisations “would be a takeover by the ABC”. SBS has less than a fifth the budget of the ABC and is far smaller.

And as to the budget savings? Aujard can see ways a merger would lead to greater costs. He says SBS has a tradition of finding ways to do things more cheaply than the ABC — a merger could see this tradition lost. “[And] employees at SBS are paid a lot less than their counterparts at the ABC,” he adds. “You’d have to give 1000 or so people a pay increase.”

Nonetheless, Simons believes, despite many false starts, some merger within the two organisations is likely.

“I think it’ll probably happen incrementally, starting with back end,” she said. The recent Lewis Review into public broadcasting efficiencies recommended some back-end functions and office space be merged, though little has come of those proposals thus far. Any merger isn’t likely to yield huge savings, she says, except, perhaps in the area of broadcast transmission. “If they can begin to negotiate as a united force in transmission contracts, there could be big savings there.”

16 thoughts on “Is it time to get rid of SBS?”

Conversely, there is a case for SBS to take over the ABC. ABC management is shamelessly British in its programming bias and staffing policy, so it’s time for a new mob at the top. Modern schoolkids have no idea why there is a Union Jack in the corner of The Flag, yet they are tomorrow’s audience for our public broadcaster.

Those subtitles are marvellous for me. No matter what noise is going on, I can still read what the faces are saying. Perhaps SBS could put subtitles under the unintelligible regional British programs and sell them back into Europe where 2ELs would appreciate a good program in an international form of the language. Perhaps Brits from other regions would appreciate the cleaned-up version too.

SBS’ move away from its ethnic focus has been detrimental to migrant communities. I would like to see it multicast further with more non-English content and non-Anglosphere focus. Perhaps an alliance with Al-Jazeera. As for the ABC, it should be broken up into smaller stations with more multi-casting. It is far too Anglo-centric, both culturally and politically, and likewise is too oriented to Sydney and Melbourne. The loss of the Adelaide studios was terrible.

As an older white Australian male, I spend on average maybe 6 or 7 hours a week with SBS, and thoroughly enjoy every minute of it.

Looking at its timetable, I see material (for example, foreign news) scheduled for a large quantity of every day. Recently, SBS showed Shameless, an English show. This show (amongst others) points out just how foreign and exotic (and multicultural) England can be and I’m sure SBS regards it in that light.

So one could argue that much of their English-speaking programming is actually helping to fulfill their charter.

Seriously, though, SBS shows an enormous quantity of material of a kind that ABC never has and never would. A merger would, in time, put a stop to that I think, because ABC and SBS have distinctly different jobs to do. They both perform magnificently, I think, and this is despite various governments but particularly the current pernicious one attacking them relentlessly and defunding them towards a slow death.

Just quickly on Newman’s comments: what he actually believes is that just one public broadcaster is one too many.

A merger between the ABC and SBS would simply create a large divided and dysfunctional organisation and do good. Even if you think either or both are unwieldy and in need of reform a merger is just not the way to go. For sure, there are opportunities to decrease the overall operating costs of the public broadcasters by combining some of their technical “back end” functions. But that’s as far as it should go.

SBS’s image problems go back a few years to a board that tried to make it a fourth commercial network. Michael Ebeid has gone some way to redressing the programming imbalance, but arguably not far enough.

SBS took over NITV a few years back, but only reluctantly and under pressure. It should have embraced the idea from the outset. Community television is on the way out for lack of spectrum yet SBS had spare capacity but wouldn’t do the right thing and make space available. Where else should community TV be housed but at the Special Broadcasting Service?

SBS needs a new Statement of Expectations from the Minister yanking it back firmly to its core purpose.

As for the ABC, it has charted a new course under Mark Scott that has set it up well for survival in the Internet age. However, like all broadcasters, public and commercial, it needs to be very careful when deciding its next steps. Becoming mired in what would be a very fetid dispute with the supporters of SBS would be extremely unwise.

I believe that the ABC/SBS audience to be exceptionally homogeneous – with for the exception of the ethnic & sport elements which is unique – and most of them make no distinction, quality oprogramming is quality programming.
Even when it’s not, it’s still orders of magnitude superior to the commercial channels.

It’s a bit of a no-brainer really. I watch SBS TV a bit and it is increasingly looking more like ABC2 with a little bit of ABC1. The token foreign language stuff is just that – a token. On the radio side it would be relatively easy to move across the foreign language services to the ABC. Back-room operations could be merged with a bit of effort (computer system integration is always problematic).

LeeT – I can’t imagine someone who watches ABC & SBS logs up many hours within cooee of commercial TV.
The SBS continuous news broadcasts, language changing with longitudes as if the day were constantly breaking, is a balm in the early morning.

If SBS was subsumed under the ABC, I would have nowhere to go to see evening news.

Alas, ABC news is just commercial lite these days. SBS actually reports news, world news, with a minimum of those meaningless crosses to a reported standing outside a house that a murderer once lived in when he was 10, 30 years ago, as though that somehow adds to a story.

A significant force for peace in the region is the ABC’s “man in Havana”, or at least, our reporters on the ground in neighbouring countries. Public opinion in these neighbouring countries is kept anchored in reality when significant people everywhere have access to open intelligence.

For many years past, Radio Australia was a major source of information for advisers throughout Southeast Asia plus. Now it has lost personnel and mutated into an Internet version of the ABC international news. But with the removal everywhere of funded professional journalists, it is all the more important that we continue to hear from our “man in Havana”, whether ABC or SBS or a hybrid of both.

Here we go again – Crikey bagging the best fre to air station that we have. Why is it that Crikey , an intelligent on line newsletter , wants to basically close down SBS. The commercial free to air are unwatcheable, ABC is full of mindless British pap and pay TV and streaming does not have on the one station all the terrific stuff that SBS has. So presumably your media correspondent is not interested in The Bridge, Borgen , Breaking Bad, Madmen etc just to mention some SBS TV series. SBS hour long news is the best Austrslia coverage of Aust and overseas news. Also SBS does fulfill its multicultural charter. Please don’t give the Government an excuse to close SBS. ( Amalgamating SBS with the ABC would effectively close it down!).